A Short Speech about Unions

Contents

Definition

A union is a memory location that is shared by two or more different types of variables. A union provides a way for interpreting the same bit pattern in two or more different ways (or forms.)

Unions and Structures

In fact, unions share structures lots of characteristics, like the way they defined and marshaled. It might be helpful to know that, like structures, unions can be defined inside a structure or even as a single entity. In addition, unions can define complex types inside, like structures too.

Example

To understand unions, we will take a simple example. Consider the following union:

typedef union CHARACTER
{
int i;
char c;
};

This was a simple union defines a character. It declared two members, i and c, it defined them in the same memory location. Thus, it provides two ways for accessing the character, by its code (int) and by its value (char). For this to work it allocates enough memory storage for holding the largest member of the union and that member is called container. Other members will overlap with the container. In our case, the container is i because it is 4 bytes (on Win32, 16 on Win16), while c is only 1 byte. Figure 1 shows how the memory is allocated for the union.

Figure 1 - CHARACTER union into memory

Results

Because the two members are sharing the same memory location, when you change one member the other is changed too. Consider the following example:

Now, i, the container, interprets the 32 bits. c, interprets the first 8 bits (notice that we converted it to unsigned char to not to show the negative value.) n, interprets the first high word (16 bits.)

Unions Usefulness

You might ask: Why I need unions at all? I could easily use the cast operator to convert between data types!

The answer is very easy. Unions come very efficient when casting between types require much overhead. Consider the following example: You are about to write an integer to a file. Unfortunately, there’s no function in the C standard library that allow you to write an int to a file, and to using fwrite function requires excessive overhead. The perfect solution is to define a union that contains an integer and a character array to allow it to be interpreted as an integer and as a character array when you need to pass it to fwrite for example. See the following code snippet:

union myval{
int i;
char str[4];
};

In addition, unions offer you more performance than casts. Moreover, your code will be more readable and efficient when you use unions.

Unions and the API

Unions exist throughout the API, however, they are usually declared inside structures and not as a single unit. A good example is the DEVMODE structure.

Why is it preferred using unions inside structures? It doesn’t make much sense if they were a single unit. For our example, you could easily convert the integer to a character rather than creating a union. However, the efficiency of unions comes when they are declared inside structures. In addition, you gain more performance (and scalability of course) when you work with unions.